The Meadow Round 3: Claudio Corallo 100%, Slitti "GranCacao" 90%, French Broad 81%, Cacao "Love Bar Patanemo Straight Up" 75%

I went to the Meadow and purchased a lot of chocolate for Leila's birthday a while back, and I gave it to her.  Then I ate it.  Anyways, I'll let her tell you about that.

Between the time I gave it to her and the time I ate it, I was feeling pretty jealous, so I went right back to the Meadow and bought some chocolate for myself:

The Claudio Corallo 100% was nice.  It fit in with my not minding Peruvian fruitiness on 100% bars, because it masks the bitterness.  It didn't stand out too much, but I enjoyed it.

Similarly, the Slitti 90% had a good, chocolatey taste, but it didn't jump out at me among other 90% bars.  I think I prefer Lindt's 90% bar, which is cheaper and more readily available.  I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

The French Broad 81% was a real winner, though.  It used raw sugar thick-grained enough to make the whole bar taste stone ground.  Nice!  I'm definitely interested in trying a broader selection of their products.

I think the best of the bunch, though, might have been the "Love Bar Patanemo Straight Up," whatever that could possibly mean, by Atlanta-based chocolatier Cacao.  It was just one of those instant, perfectly chocolatey moments.  Then, like all good things, it was gone.

Bottom Line: The Meadow's still got it, and here are four good examples.

The Meadow

Here are the main things that the Meadow sells:

1) salt
2) chocolate bars
3) bitters
4) flowers

Obviously, this is a store after our own hearts.

The Meadow's chocolate section is arranged with one entire case filled with plain bars, and one case filled with bars with stuff in them. This is ingenious, and how I would like to organize my own kitchen, if I were rich enough to own that many bars, and if I had enough self-restraint not to eat them all at once.

How did we manage to decide among so many options? you may be wondering. Well, we deliberated a lot. We ruled out every bar that we had tasted before. We asked the knowledgeable store employees for recommendations. We promised ourselves that we could come back and try different bars soon. And then we bought about sixty dollars worth of chocolate.

This is what that looked like before the massacre:

This is what it looked like after:

This was on Thursday. The bars did not last enough even to become hurricane rations.

We will be doing brief individual reviews of each of these six bars, too. So stay tuned.

BOTTOM LINE: If the annual Chocolate Show had a permanent storefront, it would look like the Meadow. But with an ounce of calm for each ounce of the Show's chaos.